At the WWDC event this week, Apple introduced a bigger, 15-inch MacBook Air, the Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra chip and a new Mac Studio.
We’ve already covered the unveiling of the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset and iOS 17 for iPhone in our previous posts.
15-inch MacBook Air
The 2023 MacBook Air has a 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display with up to 500 nits of brightness and support for 1 billion colors.
The Apple laptop weighs in at 3.3 pounds and is 11.5mm thin. It features MagSafe charging, two Thunderbolt ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
There’s a six-speaker sound system and a 1080p FaceTime HD camera on board now. In terms of battery life, you can apparently get up to 18 hours of usage.
The price of the 2023 MacBook Air starts at $1,199. It will be available across the US beginning June 13 in midnight, starlight, space gray, and silver color options.
macOS Sonoma
Although the 15-inch laptop comes with macOS Ventura out of the box, users will be able to upgrade it to Apple’s newly unveiled macOS Sonoma in fall.
So what’s new in macOS Sonoma? There are the homescreen widgets, the ability to lock your private browsing windows when you’re not using them, additional accessibility features and new screen savers.
If you’ve always fancied playing a weather reporter, then there’s Presenter Overlay for video conferencing which displays the stuff you want to share on a virtual screen behind you.
macOS Sonoma will work with the 2018 MacBook Air or later, Mac Studio 2022 and 2023, MacBook Pro 2018 or higher, iMac 2019 or newer, 2017’s iMac Pro or later, any Mac Pro model from 2019 onward, and 2018’s Mac Mini or later models.
Mac Studio & Mac Pro
The new Mac Pro marks the total shift of Mac devices from Intel to Apple silicon.
The 2023 Mac Pro integrates the M2 Ultra SoC, which is basically two M2 Max chips stitched together using UltraFusion technology. You’ll have to cough up at least $6,999 to buy it.
It boasts up to 192GB of memory with 800GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, seven PCIe expansion slots, eight Thunderbolt 4 ports, three USB-A ports and two HDMI 2.1 ports that support up to 8K resolution and up to 240Hz frame rates.
This desktop also gets two 10GB Ethernet ports, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and a headphone jack. The bad news is that since the GPU is integrated into the M2 Ultra chip, the Mac Pro doesn’t allow the you to upgrade to graphics processors such as PCIe graphics cards or MPX modules.
Moving on to the Mac Studio with the 24-core M2 Ultra chip, it allows you to plug in up to eight 4K displays (same goes for the Mac Pro). If you go for the model with the 12-core M2 Max SoC, there’s support for 5 such external displays.
The base Mac Studio with M2 Ultra model offers 1TB storage and 64GB RAM. The 60-core GPU (configurable up to 76-core), 32-core Neural Engine and 800GB/s memory bandwidth are part of the new SoC. It’s priced beginning at $3,999.
The base Mac Studio with M2 Max model has 512GB storage and 32GB RAM. The 30-core GPU (configurable up to 38-core), 16-core Neural Engine and 400GB/s memory bandwidth are part of Apple’s M2 Max chip. It’s priced starting at $1,999.
